Sunshine

I blinked my treacherous eyes, watching the things in the shadows slither and sparkle. I had plenty to worry about already. I didn’t have to worry about vampires too. One vampire. The last thing I wanted to be doing was worrying about him.

No, the next to last thing. The last thing I wanted was to be bound to him.

I hadn’t thought I had any—did I mean innocence?—to lose, after those two nights on the lake. I didn’t know you could go on finding out you’d had stuff by losing it. This didn’t seem like a very good method to me.

Over two months of being slowly poisoned probably hadn’t been really good for me either. And the nightmares had been bad. But in a way they’d still been pure. I’d made a mistake—a mistake I’d paid dearly for—but it had been a mistake.

A month ago, I’d called on Con. Okay, I was at the end of my tether. But I’d still asked a vampire for help—not Mel, not a human doctor of human medicine. And he’d helped me. The nightmares I’d had since weren’t pure at all.

My thought paused there, teetering on the edge of a precipice, and then fell over.

What if it hadn’t been a mistake, driving out to the lake? What if I’d had to do it—if not that exact thing, then something similar. What if that restlessness I hadn’t been able to name had caused exactly what it was meant to cause?

That question I hadn’t asked Con, out by the lake, is my dad another of your old enemies? Or your old friends?

Between the dark thoughts inside my head and the leaping, glittery shadows my eyes saw, I had to stop. I was at the edge of Oldroy’s Park. I groped my way to a bench and sat down.

I sat there, and stared at the tree opposite me, and the way the rough ridges of its bark seemed to wiggle where they lay in shade. My thoughts were stuck on that night at the lake. I never liked coincidence much, but I hated the sense I was making now.

I watched the wiggling bark. It occurred to me that this was new. I’d been seeing into shadows, but merely what was there, as if there was a rather erratic light on it. This was something else. Which gave me something I could bear to think about, so I thought about it. A few more minutes passed and it seemed to me it was as if I was watching the tree breathing. I found a leaf in shadow, and looked at it for a while; it twinkled, as if with tiny starbursts, but rather than thinking ugh—weird, I kept watching, till there seemed to be a pattern. I thought, it’s as if I’m watching its pores opening and closing. I looked down at my hands. The shadows between the fingers gleamed like a banked fire. The tiny shadows laid by the veins on the backs of them were a tiny, flickering dark green edged with a tinier, even more flickering red. The daylight part of the veins looked as it always did. In the shadow places I could see the blood moving.

I was sitting in sunlight, not shade. I automatically chose sun if there was any sun to be had. I remembered the sun on my back the first morning at the lake, like the arm of a friend. I closed my eyes.

I heard the footsteps but I didn’t expect them to pause.

“Pardon me,” said a voice. “Are you all right?” ;

I opened my eyes. An old woman stood there, a little bent over, leaning on the handle of her two-wheeled shopping cart. “You look—tired,” she said. “Can I fetch you anything? There is a shop on the corner. And it has a pay phone. Can I call someone for you?”

She had a nice face. She would be someone you would be glad to have as a neighbor, or as a regular at the coffeehouse you and your family ran. I looked at the shadows that fell half across her face and saw…I don’t know how…that she was a partblood. And that something about my expression was maybe making her guess I might be going through finding that out about myself. And remembering how hard this was she was going to ask me, a total stranger, if I was all right.

I hauled myself back into the ordinary world, and the vision faded. The shadows that fell across her face reverted to being the usual, disorienting, see-through, funny-edged shadows I’d been seeing for a month. She smiled. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I—er—I thought you might perhaps—er—”

“Want to be disturbed?” I said. “Yes. Isn’t it…silly…how…upsetting…just thinking can be?”

“It’s not silly at all. The insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.”

Scarier than vampires? I thought. Scarier than an affinity for vampires? Well. That was what she’d said, wasn’t it? What my mind contained was an affinity for vampires.